Musings of a mobile marketer

I am Helen Keegan, a veteran of mobile marketing, advertising and media since 2000. This is my diary and musings about mobile since 2004. I am part consultant and part events organiser in London, Barcelona & beyond (Swedish Beers & Heroes of the Mobile Fringe). I write here about mobile tech and media, and some other stuff too.

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Thursday, May 03, 2018

This will be my third visit to this annual conference organised by Mark Littlewood. And it's always been a cracker - chock full of great content, good food, interesting conversations and actionable insights. This year we're at the Barbican and I'm really looking forward to hanging out with everyone again. It makes a change to be at someone else's event and not organising it!

If you fancy a speaker slot, then there's still just about time to apply for one a spot in the lightning talks session. Read on for details on how to apply, more about the conference and a discounted ticket offer (I've been given a few discounted tickets).

So what's this all about then?Why would you want to come? Because you want to spend time learning how great software companies are built at a conference where the attendees are not the product.

What is it? A single-track conference to help you build great software and a profitable business. In depth talks, curated content. Zero sales/sponsor pitches or panels. If you're looking for coding sessions, this one isn't for you.

I'm particularly looking forward to hearing about product culture from Bruce, Laura's session on building a business against well-funded competitors and the fall and rise of enterprise software from Bill.

Schedule – You can view more details on timing, speakers and session content here.

Who Comes? A potent mix of Founders, CEOs, CMOs, CTOs, COOs, CPOs and emerging leaders in scale-up and grown-up software companies, a few people from innovative corporates who want to embrace change, some smart investors. The common thread - people interested in getting better at what they do and learning new ideas that will impact their businesses and careers.

Fancy speaking at the conference? Well, it's too late to join one of the main sessions, but applications are still being accepted for a spot during the lightning sessions. If you'd like to put yourself forward for one of those spots, you can find out how to do that here

And lucky for you, I have a few discounted tickets available with my special registration link where you get 20% off the April rate of £795 + Fees/VAT (The price goes up nearer the date). If you're prompted for a code, please use TechnoKitten. Not only that, there's a guarantee of quality. BoS offers you a full refund of the ticket price, if at the end of the conference you decide you did not get value out of it. You have nothing to lose!

Wednesday, April 11, 2018

For those of you interested in start-ups and growth businesses, this list will be invaluable. It's a link to the FT 1000 which lists the companies in 31 European countries that have achieved the highest compound annual growth rate in revenue between 2013 and 2016. Note the measurement is revenue not profit.

It's worth a glance if you have any interest in business. The data is downloadable as a spreadsheet and searchable. The FT also shares their methodology.

London has held on to its position as the most popular base for HQ with 74 entries (Paris has 62, Milan 25).

Fintech has performed well (Good news for London).

UK, Spain, Germany and France all have a strong presence in the Top 20.

The lowest average growth rate in this year's ranking was 34.6% vs last year's 16.1%.

Germany leads the way in the advertising sector as they also do in the Automobile sector. I would have expected the latter but not the former. I wonder why British advertising companies aren't showing similar growth.

I haven't heard of the majority of these companies. Am I out of touch? Maybe. Or is that successful companies very often get there completely under the radar? Or maybe it's down to my focus and visibility of British companies. I'm thinking probably the latter. Something for me to ponder on over a cup of tea...

Tuesday, March 20, 2018

I didn't actually know there was an International Day of Happiness until this morning. Apparently, it's today. It's a United Nations thing and started in 2012. "It's an annual celebration of happiness as a fundamental human right and goal for all of humanity. This year's theme, #TenBillionHappy, sets our sites (sic) on the year 2050, when it is projected that 10 Billion people will inhabit the Earth. Our goal is to inspire, develop and promote initiatives with global citizens, governments, nonprofits, NGOs, and the private sector, to secure Happiness for All™ by 2050." You can find out more on the official website.

I'm all for creating more happiness where possible and there are some really simple steps you can take. This graphic from Sylvia Duckworth sums it up a treat.

Wednesday, March 14, 2018

We've now had a little time to recover from Mobile World Congress and digest what we saw and what we talked about. It's a big show with 108,000 visitors from all over the world and it covers every single aspect of mobile technology. It's impossible to take it all in, even if you were there every day and walked up and down every hall twice. And if you weren't there, what did you miss?

I hope my panel session next Wednesday 21 March in London will help fill in the gaps and make some sense of it all. I'll be chairing the session and will be joined by Paul Stringer, who heads up the mobile team at Equal Experts, Priya Prakash who is founder of D4SC and is also one of the UK Government's DIT Technology Specialists and Rafe Blandford, who is DigitasLBi's mobile guru. I also happen to know that there will be some MWC18 attendees in the audience who also know their stuff and I'm hoping will also contribute to the discussion.

What a fab time we had at Swedish Beers a couple of weeks back in Barcelona. Admittedly, the weather wasn't up to much, but Muy Buenas gave us a very warm welcome despite us drinking the bar dry and having to have an emergency beer and wine delivery at midnight!

First up some thank yous:

Swedish Beers Sponsors & Supporters BCN 2018

To Carolina and her team at Muy Buenas for looking after us so well.

To Rosa, Patrick, Irene, Ida and Angel for being the welcoming committee with me at the door.

And to all of you who came and who keep the Swedish Beers spirit alive and kicking.

The photos
I've uploaded all the ones I've received and all the professional ones by the fabulous Erika Arias. But if you have any to add these, please let me have them and I'll include them in the Swedish Beers party albums on Facebook and Flickr with appropriate credits. Feel free to tag yourselves in the photos and share away!

Thursday, February 15, 2018

The lovely people at Trustonic have come up trumps again with a lovely Mobile World Congress pass giveaway. We have five passes to give away. Closing date is Wednesday 21 February 2018. All you have to do is answer one question and provide us with your contact details. The form is below.